Thy Strong Word from KFUO Radio

The church at Antioch is worshiping and fasting when the Holy Spirit says, "Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul." They pray, lay hands on the two men, and send them off to proclaim the faith. From there the word runs into a sorcerer on Cyprus and into a synagogue in Pisidian Antioch, where Paul preaches the God who kept His promise and brought Israel a Savior from David's line.  The Rev. Robert Smi...

An angel wakes Peter the night before his execution and walks him out of a locked prison past the guards. When he shows up at the door where the believers are gathered, a servant girl named Rhoda is so glad to hear his voice that she runs off and leaves him standing outside knocking. The praying believers within the home can’t believe it and say, “it’s his angel.” This chapter is full of drama and...

When Peter comes back from baptizing a Roman household, the first thing he gets is criticism for eating with the wrong people, and he answers by simply telling what God did until the objections fall silent. It was here, at Antioch, that believers were first called Christians, a name probably meant as an insult but stuck as a badge of honor. The gospel keeps crossing the lines we are sure should no...

Peter crosses a threshold no faithful Jew of his day would cross: he walks into a Gentile's house and opens with a confession, that God has shown him he must not call any person unclean. Then he preaches Jesus, crucified and raised and appointed judge of the living and the dead, and as that word goes out the Holy Spirit falls on the whole household, before Peter can even finish. It is Christ preac...

The word "rise" rings through these chapters like a bell. A paralyzed man rises from a mat he hadn't left in eight years. A dead woman named Tabitha rises and takes Peter's hand. And Peter himself sees a vision that shakes off a lifetime of assumptions about who's in and who's out in the kingdom of God when a sheet full of unclean animals drops from heaven and a voice says, "Rise, Peter. Kill and...

As the nation marks its 250th birthday, we take up the word at the heart of the celebration: freedom. Civil freedom is a genuine, God-given good, worth our gratitude and our protection. But the freedom Christ won for us is a profoundly different thing, and confusing the two can obscure the Gospel. This episode explores the distinction between civil freedom and Christian freedom through the lens of...

A man bent on wiping out the church was on the road to arrest more Christians when a light knocked him to the ground and a voice asked why he was persecuting Jesus himself. Grace ambushed Saul and turned him inside out before he could say a word. Then the Lord asks a frightened disciple named Ananias to go welcome the very man he has every reason to fear, so that two miracles happen at once: the c...

An important official from a faraway court is riding home, reading a scroll he cannot understand, when God sends Philip to run alongside the chariot. The man is honest about his confusion: how can I understand unless someone guides me? Philip starts right where he is reading and shows him Jesus on the page, and before long there is water and a baptism and a stranger going home rejoicing. This epis...

Persecution breaks out, the believers scatter, and what looks like the worst thing that could happen to the church becomes the means by which the gospel spreads. The people who fled kept preaching wherever they landed, and Philip ends up in Samaria, of all places, bringing the message to people the Jews had long despised. We also meet Simon, who wants to buy the Spirit's power, showing how quickly...

It is hard to imagine praying for the people actively trying to kill you. Stephen does exactly that, asking God to forgive the very men stoning him while a young man named Saul watches at the edge of the crowd, holding the coats. The first Christian martyr dies praying for his murderers, and one of those murderers becomes the missionary who later carries the gospel across the empire. This chapter...

The early church hits a snag in its efforts to take care of the vulnerable among them: some widows are being overlooked in the daily distribution of food, and people are upset. Rather than ignore it, the apostles appoint seven trustworthy men to handle the work so the preaching can continue, honoring both practical care and the ministry of the word. One of those seven, Stephen, turns out to be so...

The apostles are arrested, freed by an angel during the night, and found the next morning right back in the temple, preaching, which is the last thing their jailers expected. As the authorities scramble, a respected teacher named Gamaliel cools the room with a shrewd warning: if this movement is merely human, it will collapse on its own, but if it is from God, you will not be able to stop it, and...

A community so generous that no one claimed anything as their own sounds like a dream until the next scene turns deadly serious. Ananias and Sapphira sell some property, keep part of the money, and lie about it to look more sacrificial than they were, and what condemned them was the pretending. The early church needed to learn that the God who fills his people with grace is not mocked by play-acti...

Peter and John heal a man crippled from birth, and their reward is arrest. By the time the guards haul them in, the number of believers has grown to about five thousand, and the temple authorities have seen enough. The next day the two apostles stand before the same council that had condemned Jesus, with Annas and Caiaphas presiding. The order is blunt: stop speaking in this name. Peter and John r...

Luke gives us a snapshot of the first church that still makes congregations homesick: devoted to the apostles' teaching, to the breaking of bread, to prayer, and to one another. Then a man lame from birth, who has begged at the temple gate his whole life, asks Peter for money and gets something he never imagined instead, walking and leaping in the name of Jesus. This chapter holds together the ord...

Weeks after denying he even knew Jesus, Peter stands before a crowd in Jerusalem and preaches that the man they crucified is Lord and Christ. When the words land and the people ask what they should do, Peter answers with repentance, baptism, and forgiveness rather than a load of guilt, and three thousand are baptized that day. The same Peter who crumbled before a servant girl now cannot be silence...

Have you ever wished God would do something so plain that no one could explain it away? Pentecost is that kind of morning, when a sound like a violent wind fills the house, fire rests on each of them, and ordinary Galileans start speaking languages they never learned. The same Spirit who turned frightened followers into bold preachers is the one given to the church to turn the world's eyes toward...

Jesus has risen, the disciples have him back, and the first thing he tells them is to wait, which may be the hardest command in the book. Then he is taken up, and two angels gently ask why they are still staring at the sky. Most of the Christian life is lived in that in-between space, after the promise and before the fulfillment. This first episode sets the table for everything that follows and sp...

The book of Acts picks up where the Gospels leave off. Jesus has risen. He has ascended. And now what? Acts answers that question. Luke tells the story of how the Holy Spirit built the Church from a handful of frightened disciples in Jerusalem into a movement that reached Rome itself. Along the way, you get Pentecost, the first sermons, the first martyrs, the conversion of Paul, the first church c...

Most people skip Romans 16 because it looks like a list of names they cannot pronounce. But every name here is a person who carried the Gospel to Rome before Paul ever arrived. Phoebe delivered this letter. Prisca and Aquila risked their necks for Paul's life. Andronicus and Junia were in prison with him. These are real Christians with real stories, and Paul knows them by name even though he has n...

Strong Christians know their freedom in Christ. Weak Christians are careful not to violate their consciences. The tension between them is real, but Paul insists that neither group belongs to itself. Both belong to the Lord who died and rose again for them. Rather than judging or despising one another, Christians are called to bear with each other in love, just as Christ bore with them. As Paul bri...

Romans 14 focuses on Christian liberty, love, and unity within the church, and faith, love, and conscience shape our actions and relationships as believers. Christ's death and resurrection establish His Lordship over all, and love and conscience should guide our actions toward others. While we avoid passing judgment and causing others to stumble, our actions should reflect faith and gratitude to G...

Every election cycle, Christians argue about what they owe the government and where that obligation ends. Paul wrote the original version of that argument. The governing authority is God's servant, he says, and you owe it taxes, respect, and honor. That was written under Nero, which means Paul is not talking about a government that deserves your admiration. He is talking about an office God establ...

After eleven chapters of what God has done for you, Paul says “therefore” and gets specific about what it looks like to live in God’s grace. He tells us: Present your bodies as living sacrifices. Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind. Love without hypocrisy. Think soberly about your gifts. Feed your enemy when he is hungry. This is where Paul connects doc...

If you are a Gentile Christian, you are a wild branch grafted into someone else's tree. But what of the original covenant? God has not abandoned His people. Though many have fallen away, he kept a remnant by grace, and Paul himself is the proof. But what does Paul mean when he says, "all Israel will be saved"? This is one of the most debated passages in the letter, and getting it wrong has real co...